Letter to the Dover (NH) Foster's Daily Democrat
Timothy Horrigan
Written September 1, 2005; Published September 6, 2005
This is a letter I wrote immediately after the seriousness of Hurricane Katrina. In retrospect, I may have underestimated the importance of the looting.
The looting shown on TV was trivial, and in most cases it was not at
all irrational: it was almost entirely ordinary people taking items needed for survival in extraordinary circumstances.
However, there was somewhat more serious lawlessness going on
off-camera. In particular, interviews with foreign tourists in the
international media generally indicate that there was actually more
violence at the Superdome in particular than the Bush-controlled
domestic media let on. On the other hand, the reports of snipers
shooting down medevac helicopters and the like were pure fantasy cooked up to
establish that “Those Folks” in “That Area” didn't “deserve” to be
rescued.
And in any case, my original point still holds true:
this disaster was not caused by the looters, and the poor and the
powerless are not to blame for their suffering.
Hurricane
victims are not to blame
To the editor:
Blaming
the victim is an old American tradition that has been carried over to
the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
In the first days of
the disaster, the media obsessed over a trivial part of the story:
i.e., the looting in downtown New Orleans. Looting is reprehensible,
but the looters are not the villains here. The looters aren't
responsible for the failure to build adequate flood control systems
in New Orleans and elsewhere.
(Katrina was a powerful storm,
but it was not a unforeseeable catastrophe.)
The looters
aren't responsible for the fact that inadequate plans were made in
advance for feeding and sheltering the victims of the storm. The
looters aren't even responsible for the fact that thousands of
National Guard troops were unavailable because they had been sent off
to Iraq.
The poor, the old, the weak, the sick and the
powerless have been especially hard hit by the storm. There have been
some ugly comments to the effect that the victims are to blame for
their suffering because they were too stupid to leave (e.g., the
Houston
Chronicle's Cragg Hines's Sept. 1 op-ed)
Sadly, it is
virtually impossible to be smart when you have nowhere to go and no
way of getting there. It's easier to be smart when you are have
resources, as we saw in the case of a local woman named Johnice
Katz who was, until last week, a student at Loyola University in
New Orleans. She and her housemates initially opted to ride out the
storm, but then they got smart and fled to Houston. Ms. Katz is now
back home in Somersworth.
She had a car, as well as enough
money to buy gas to Houston and a plane ticket to Manchester. She
became one of the smart ones who got out. She had someplace to go and
a way of getting there. If she had no way of getting out of New
Orleans, she would have ended up being one of the so-called stupid
ones who stayed behind.
Timothy Horrigan
Durham
Foster's
Daily Democrat, Sept. 8, 2005 Letters to the Editor Page
(Click here to see my Hurricane Katrina page!)
Read
The Forgotten Liars, the novel by Timothy
Horrigan